On the Greenheart Games blog, developer Patrick Klug details how he intentionally seeded a "pirated" version of Game Dev Tycoon at the very moment that the title went up on the developer's store yesterday. This illicit version plays exactly like the official paid version for the first few hours, letting players control a miniature game development studio trying to release successful titles in a simulated marketplace.

After a while, though, those playing the pirated version will be confronted with a message that, as Klug puts it, takes "the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers."

Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally. If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.

That's right: players in the pirated version will inevitably find themselves failing thanks to piracy. Interestingly, this tweak arguably makes the illegal version of Game Dev Tycoon a little more true-to-life than the version that players can actually buy (though in a way that's decidedly not very fun for the player).

Most pirates, on seeing the above message, might take it as a good opportunity to take a good, hard look at themselves and examine the effects their own actions are having on the developers. Some players, though, apparently missed the irony and instead took to message boards to complain about the effect piracy was having on their in-game studio... in a game they themselves pirated.

"Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me! ... Not fair" wrote one user while busy being "not fair" to the developers of Game Dev Tycoon. "I can't make any profit... I mean can I research a DRM or something" wrote another user, who would likely have been incensed if Greenheart Games had put DRM on the game he was playing.

While it's easy to laugh at the lack of self-awareness on display, the actual usage statistics for Game Dev Tycoon probably don't seem that funny to Greenheart Games. After a single day on the market, the developer found that the 214 users that bought the game for $7.99 (or 6.49EUR) were dwarfed by at least 3,100 pirates. That's more than 93 percent of players who didn't pay a cent. This might sound high, but it's in line with what otherPC game developershave seen for their titles. Even pay-what-you-want bundles that offer their games for as little as a penny can run into serious problems with pirates.

We can argue all day about just how many of those pirates would have actually plunked down the money for Game Dev Tycoon if piracy wasn't an option, but we can only imagine that it would be more than zero. In any case, hopefully a few of those thousands of pirates will at least come across a bit of additional empathy for the hard-working, piracy-plagued game developers after their experience with the "cracked" version of Game Dev Tycoon.

Actually the funniest antipiracy is still Starflight, where if you failed the codewheel check twice, you would get 'pulled over' by the Interstel Police Patrol ships for violation of the Copyright Act - in the 30th Century evidently a capital crime - <G>.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.